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Alexander the Bouncer.

all great men have their weak side.
Alexander of Macedon was given to grog.
Alexander, of Georgia, V. P. C. S., is given to gammon.
His weakness is “to say the thing that is not” --this being the periphrastical way in which Dean Swift's fastidious Houyhnhnms always spoke of falsehood and of falsifiers.
The Hon. Y. P. Alex. Ham. Stephens upon arriving at Atlanta, Ga., was “received by a large crowd;” and in return he ungratefully made a speech calculated largely to delude the “large crowd,” and considerably to lower himself in the estimation of old-fashioned folk with a prejudice in favor of the truth.
From a great variety of mendacities, we select, the following as being, to use the words of Goldsmith, the “damnable bounce” of the occasion.

A threatening war is upon us, made by those who have no regard for right.
We fight for our homes!
They for money.
The hirelings and mercenaries of the North are all hand and hand against you.

Now, Stephens, what did you mean by that?
Is not Washington just as much the home of the Massachusetts man as of the Georgian?
You took a pretty long journey to Virginia to persuade men from the
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path of honor and of loyalty.
Were you at home there?
And if so, why are not our New York and other regiments at home in Washington?
And being there, to defend what should be the home of every true American citizen, and is to all intents and purposes the home of his representatives, by what authority, upon what pretense, do you call these consistent and courageous men “mercenaries and hirelings!”
What is the “hireling?”
One who serves for wages.
Has the Seventh Regiment gone to Washington upon a money-making excursion?
HIave all these brave fellows enlisted for the sake of pay, which is about as much per annum as some of them could at their proper avocations make in a month — to say nothing of risk to health and life — nothing of absence from their families?
“Hirelings,” forsooth!
When you go to the Confederate treasury to draw your quarter's salary, O Alexander — mind, we do not say that you will get it — pray will you then be a hireling?

Mercenaries are those who are “retained as serving for pay” --as, for example, Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens and other Confederate notabilities — for pay of some kind they certainly intend to get, either in praise or power or pence.
The soldiers of the United States may receive a pittance; but if this sweet squad of Confederate officials are not mercenary, why are our brave militia-men mercenary?--our soldiers extemporised from the field, the factory and every haunt of industry?
Answer that question, Alexander!

The rapidity with which an Italian buffo-singer can
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deliver the words of his song is tediously slow in comparison with Mr. Stephens's volubility of untruths.
If we might speak a little coarsely, being somewhat provoked, we would say that he lies like lightning.
He told the Atalantese a succession of Munchausen stories — how Maryland had resolved “to a man to stand by the South” --how “all the public buildings in Washington have been mined for the purpose of destroying them” --how an attempt had been made “to burn the whole city of Norfolk” --how only the interposition of Providence prevented a second “conflagration of Moscow.”
All these agreeable and ingenious fictions and Fernando-Mendez-Pinto-ish recreations were strangely diversified by strong threads of piety and patronizing allusions to the Deity, complimentary observations on Providence, with little prayers here and there interpolated.
In fine, a more curious olla of a speech we, who have read many speeches, do not remember.
So having finished — that is, having exhausted his invention — the Vice President went to bed to dream in a good, improving, orthodox way of Ananias and Sapphira.

Mercenaries of the North!--hirelings of New England, of New York, of Pennsylvania! “Goths and Vandals” though, according to Gov. Pickens, you be, pray, whatever may happen, try to tell the truth.
See what a mean figure V. P. Alexander cuts, standing in a tavern balcony, retailing silly gossip to his gaping dupes!

A lie is like a tumbler of soda-water.
It foams and frizzes, and is palatable at first, but in a moment
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is only fit to be thrown out at the window.
Thus far the Southern Confederacy has been mainly maintained by public fibs, by private fibs, by the fib telegraphic, the fib editorial, the fib diplomatic, the fib epistolary and the fib oratorical.
We think that there must have been many Gascons among the original founders of South Carolina, and if so, how have they improved upon their ancestors!--upon those worthy people who did now and then tell the truth by accident!

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